Can "diskpart clean all" be performed after a "diskpart clean" ?

[gctex]

Can "diskpart clean all" be performed after a "diskpart clean" ?

Hi all,

I have an external 2Tb hard disk that's gone bad. It is under warranty so I can return it back. I was trying to wipe it clean and erroneously ran "diskpart clean" instead of "diskpart clean all". Now that all partitions are all gone, my laptop won't recognize it anymore.

1. It shows up as "unknown", "not initiated" & "unallocated" on disk management.
2. Trying to initialize the disk gives the error "the device cannot find the sector requested".
3. There's no drive letter.
4. Diskpart doesn't list its volume but lists the disk.
5. It is listed under disk drives on device manager and device status says "This device is working properly".

Is there anyway to run "diskpart clean all" now? I guess a disk's volume needs to be selected before diskpart clean all" is executed.

I just would like to wipe the data before returning it. Since there is no drive letter I can't format it either.

Thanks !

 

[Dwarf]

If diskpart can see the disk, then you should be able to proceed with a clean all. Just list the disks, select the relevant one and issue the command. Note that if the disk is indeed faulty (as you suspect), then it is possible that the command will be unable to complete. Even so, it will take a considerable time (especially as it's an external USB drive), so it's probably best to start this to run overnight. Don't forget to disable any power saving features so that your laptop doesn't sleep automatically whilst doing this. It might also be beneficial to do this whilst you have the charger plugged in.

 

[karlsnooks]

gctex,
The one word answer is yes.

As pointed out by Dwarf, this will take several hours.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

You say diskpart still lists the disk.

Have you attempted to create a new partition on the drive in diskpart? And then clean all?

There are other tools:


SDelete

CMRR - Secure Erase

About DBAN | Darik's Boot And Nuke

 

[karlsnooks]

DiskPart's clean all command is disk-oriented. There can be zero partitions or any number of partitions.

 

[gctex]

Thanks a lot guys, what I mean to say is I can do this:

• list disk (it lists all disks. The one I want to clean up shows up as disk 3 with 1862 Gb)
• select disk 3 (disk 3 is now selected)
• list vol (it doesn't list any vol with 1862 Gb, all other volumes are listed. Before I ran "clean" command earlier, this volume of 1862 Gb was listed.)

I guess "clean" and "clean all" require you to select the appropriate volume before proceeding. There are other volumes that I do NOT want to touch.

@ignatzatsonic, no, I haven't looked at Sdelete or other tools. Looking at them now.

 

[karlsnooks]

gctex,
did you know that diskpart has a help command?

Using the help command, you will see that Clean and Clean All are disk level commands.

To use clean or clean all, you select a disk. You do not select a volume. You do not select a partition.

if you want to clean disk 3, then
select disk 3
clean

it's that simple.

 

[Dwarf]

You don't need the list vol command. For clean and clean all, this command is superfluous, as those two commands will remove all partitions (volumes) from that disk and leave it (when completed) in a RAW state, ready for partitioning/formatting or whatever in an OS of your choice.

 

[gctex]

@ignatzatsonic

SDelete requires file, directory or drive letter to be provided. So I don't think that'll work here.
Secure Erase erred coz it works only for 32bit OS. My OS is 64bit.

 

[gctex]

oh ok guys. I didn't know that "clean" & "clean all" didn't require volume to be selected. Somehow I was under that impression.

I'll give it a try and see. Thanks all.

 

[gctex]

Out of curiosity, will this work?

list disk
select disk 3
create volume simple (creates volume on the whole of the selected disk)
list vol
select vol <new volume>
assign letter=L
format L: /FS:NTFS (the good old way of full formatting)

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello.

The clean and the clean all will do every sector of the entire HDD it's pointed at, it will not do single partitions, all data on the HDD will be permenetlly over-written; have a look through these tutorials linked below for some ideas.

Secure Erase / Wipe : Definition and Methods

SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation


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